Amherst College - david sofieldhttps://www.amherst.edu/taxonomy/term/4306
enhttps://www.amherst.edu/alumni/learn/amherst_today/video/node/349245
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="fine-print"><span class="orange-heading">Poet David Sofield, the Samuel Williston Professor of English,</span> read selections from his work and that of the late James Merrill ’47.</p>
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<p class="fine-print">September 23, 2011 <a href="mm/467">Amherst Today</a> program</p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/17">amherst today</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1765">poetry</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4306">david sofield</a></div></div></div><ul class="links inline"><li class="sharethis first last"><a href="/sharethis-ajax/349245" class="mm-sharethis">Share</a></li>
</ul>Thu, 06 Oct 2011 04:00:00 +0000wwjarnagin349245 at https://www.amherst.edu1984 Report on Conditions for Faculty Womenhttps://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/colloquia/colloquium-seminar-archives/women_teaching/faculty_women1984/node/331047
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Report submitted October 1984 by Amrita Basu, Frederick Griffiths, Stephanie Sandler, David Sofield (chair) and Marguerite Waller, members of the Ad Hoc Committee selected by the Committee of Six and assigned to answer nine specific questions 1n November 1983.</p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-upload field-type-file field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><table class="sticky-enabled">
<thead><tr><th>Attachment</th><th>Size</th> </tr></thead>
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<tr class="odd"><td><span class="file"><img class="file-icon" alt="" title="application/pdf" src="/modules/file/icons/application-pdf.png" /> <a href="https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/1984%2520Report%2520on%2520Conditions%2520of%2520Work%2520for%2520Faculty%2520Women.pdf" type="application/pdf; length=3115608" title="1984 Report on Conditions of Work for Faculty Women.pdf">1984 Report on Conditions of Work for Faculty Women.pdf</a></span></td><td>2.97 MB</td> </tr>
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</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4306">david sofield</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/5877">Frederick Griffiths</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/13434">Amrita Basu</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/15994">1984 Report on Conditions for Faculty Women at Amherst College</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/15995">Stephanie Sandler</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/15996">Marguerite Waller</a></div></div></div>Mon, 01 Aug 2011 15:51:56 +0000pmallen331047 at https://www.amherst.eduHalf a Century of Women Teaching at Amherst: Gender Mattershttps://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/colloquia/colloquium-seminar-archives/women_teaching/sched/node/330826
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h4 align="left">Symposium Schedule for Saturday, October 1, 2011</h4>
<p>8:30-9:00 a.m. Breakfast. Lobby of Converse Hall.</p>
<p>9:00-9:10 a.m. Welcome and memorial minute. Buffy Aries (Psychology) and Pat O’Hara (Chemistry).</p>
<p>9:10-9:15 a.m. Brief history of the arrival of the pioneer women. Jane Taubman (Russian)</p>
<p>9:15-10:30 a.m. <strong> Round table discussion: The Early Years </strong> </p>
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<blockquote><div> <span class="no-padding"> <strong><em>Part I: Committees, Collegiality and the Classroom</em></strong></span></div></blockquote>
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<blockquote><div>1. Committees: What was your experience in serving on college committees, in administrative tasks for your department or program? Did you feel unfairly burdened by tokenism? Did you feel your voice was heard, your ideas acknowledged or accepted?</div></blockquote>
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<blockquote><div>2. Collegiality: How well supported did you feel in your teaching, research, and other aspects of faculty life, including committee work? Did you have a mentor or mentors? To whom did you turn for advice and an understanding of the college’s many unwritten rules and customs? </div></blockquote>
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<blockquote><div>3. The Classroom: How was your teaching style received by students, still largely male? Did students bring different assumptions to their evaluation of the competence of male and female faculty?</div></blockquote>
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<blockquote><div>Participants (by year of arrival): Jane Taubman (1973), Susan Lewandowski (1974), Joan Dassin (1974), Kate Hartford (1974), Rachel Kitzinger (1974), Margie Waller (1974), Helene Scher (1975), Deborah Gewertz (1977), Laura Wexler (1977), Ruth Stark (1979)</div></blockquote>
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<p>Moderator: Buffy Aries (1975)</p>
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<p>10:30 – 10:45 a.m. Break</p>
<p>10:45 -12:00 <strong> Round table discussion: The Early Years</strong></p>
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<blockquote><div><strong><em>Part II: Evaluation and Tenure, Work-life Balance, the 1984 Report of the Ad Hoc Committee to Study the Conditions of Work for Faculty Women at Amherst College (<a href="/academiclife/colloquia/women_teaching/faculty_women1984">Full text of the report</a>)</em></strong></div></blockquote>
<blockquote><div>1. Evaluation and Tenure: Was the absence of a separate women’s studies program perceived as a signal that scholarship on women is less valued? How did your sub-specialty and research interests fit into the existing profile of your department or program? Were you expected to bring new methodologies or areas of study to the department, or were you largely hired to replace a departing member?</div></blockquote>
<blockquote><div><br>2. Work-life Balance: Were the regularly accepted practices of the college predicated on a model of the one-career family with spouse’s support? Did the college adequately recognize the demands of child-rearing as well as childbearing?</div></blockquote>
<blockquote><div><br>3. The <a href="/academiclife/colloquia/women_teaching/faculty_women1984">1984 Report</a> and Its Reception<br>Additional participants: David Sofield (1965), Amrita Basu (1981), Stephanie Sandler (1981)</div></blockquote>
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<blockquote><div>Moderator: Pat O’Hara (1983)</div></blockquote>
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<p>12:15 -1:15 p.m. Lunch. Talk by President Biddy Martin</p>
<p>1:30 – 2:45 p.m. <em><strong>Amherst Today: Where Are We, Where Should We Be and How Do We Get There?</strong></em></p>
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<blockquote><div> Panel:
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<p> Women in the Curriculum, Michele Barale (1987, English and WAGS)</p>
<p><br>Women in Science and Work-life Balance, Caroline Goutte (1996, Biology)</p>
<p><br><a href="/academiclife/colloquia/women_teaching/diversity_inclusion2007">Diversity and Inclusion at Amherst: The 2007 Report</a>, Rhonda Cobham-Sander (1986, English and Black Studies)</p>
<p><br>Reflections of a former Dean of the Faculty, Lisa Raskin (1979, Psychology and Neuroscience)</p>
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<p>Moderator: Pat O’Hara (1983)</p>
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<p>2:45 – 3:00 p.m. Closing – Paula Rauch Class of 1977, Amherst College Board of Trustees</p>
<p>3:00 – 4:30 p.m. Refreshments and further reflection –Lobby of Converse Hall.<br><br></p>
<p> </p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2232">Deborah Gewertz</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4306">david sofield</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4698">Paula Rauch</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/5897">Caroline Goutte</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/7763">Jane Taubman</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/8693">Elizabeth Aries</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/10650">michele barale</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/13434">Amrita Basu</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/14352">Lisa Raskin</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/15561">Biddy Martin</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/15987">Half a Century of Women Teaching at Amherst</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/15988">Rose Olver</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/15989">Amherst College Women</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/15991">Women at Amherst</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/15992">Patricia O&#039;Hara</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/15995">Stephanie Sandler</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/15996">Marguerite Waller</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/15998">Rhonda Cobham Sander</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/15999">Susan Lewandoski</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/16000">Joan Dassin</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/16001">Kate Hartford</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/16002">Rachel Kitzinger</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/16003">Helene Scher</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/16004">Laura Wexler</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/16005">Ruth Stark</a></div></div></div>Thu, 28 Jul 2011 04:00:00 +0000pmallen330826 at https://www.amherst.eduThe Poet Returnshttps://www.amherst.edu/amherst-story/magazine/issues/2009spring/collegerow/poet/node/109562
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="fine-print"><span class="inline"><img class="image original" src="/media/view/109728/original/138540040_w.jpg" border="0" width="294" height="300" alt="image"></span>Richard Wilbur '42 (left), a former U.S. poet laureate, has returned to Amherst to teach a poetry workshop with Professor David Sofield.</span><span class="fine-print">By Emily Gold Boutilier</span><br><br><span class="drop-cap2">R</span>ichard Wilbur ’42 is a former U.S. poet laureate and the winner of a National Book Award and two Pulitzer Prizes. He published his first poem in <i>The Saturday Evening Post</i> while serving in World War II. Now, Wilbur is back at Amherst as a John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer. This spring, he co-taught a poetry workshop with longtime friend David Sofield, the Samuel Williston Professor of English. <br><br> “Writing Poetry I” met on Wednesdays in the Clyde Fitch Room of Converse Hall. Among the weekly assignments, Sofield and Wilbur asked students to compose a descriptive poem, to attempt a long poem (at least 30 lines) and to translate, from the Italian, Umberto Saba’s “Ulisse.”<br><br> The translation idea was Wilbur’s. “It’s madness, this business of translation,” he said on a March afternoon, joining Sofield and 10 students around a dark wood table. As the instructors explained, a translator’s job is to stay faithful to both the original meaning and the original form, finding and using the closest corresponding form in English. In the case of “Ulisse,” they agreed, the closest English meter is iambic pentameter.<br><br> Students read their translations aloud. “The choice of the word <i>appetite </i>to replace <i>love </i>is very good,” one student said of a classmate’s work. Sofield added, “<i>Ever-grieving</i> strikes me as a good alternative” to the Italian <i>doloroso</i>, which means <i>grief-stricken</i>. Of another translation, Sofield objected to the inclusion of the word <i>juvenescence</i>. “That was from the thesaurus,” the translator admitted. Wilbur gently suggested that another student had “needlessly gone an extra mile by trying to rhyme,” leading “to certain distortions.” <br><br> Near the end of the session, a student questioned her classmate’s use of the phrase born foreign for the Italian <i>nessuno</i>, which means <i>no-man’s land</i>. The translator said he’d been unable to make <i>no-man’s land</i> fit the poem’s rhythm. “You could use, ‘And that no-man’s land now is my home,’” suggested the classmate. The translator replied, “Wow, that’s magic!” <br><br> “One can’t really teach poetry, but one can facilitate it,” Wilbur said in a recent video interview for the college’s Web site. In any poetry writing course, only two or three students will prove to be publishable poets, he added. “But that doesn’t matter. The important thing is to get oneself eloquently off one’s chest.” <br><br> Next semester, Sofield and Wilbur will teach a poetry reading course together.</p><p> </p><p><b><span class="inline"><b><img class="image original" src="/media/view/83713/original/video.gif" border="0" alt="video" title="video" width="14" height="11"></b></span> Watch a <a href="/news/classroom">video interview with Richard Wilbur '42</a>.</b></p><p> </p><p><span class="fine-print">Photo by Samuel Masinter '04</span></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1765">poetry</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2707">translation</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2898">richard wilbur</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4306">david sofield</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4618">Wilbur</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/10375">sofield</a></div></div></div>Mon, 11 May 2009 17:11:00 +0000kdduke109562 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/amherst-story/magazine/issues/2009spring/collegerow/poet/node/109562#commentsA Poetic Homecominghttps://www.amherst.edu/news/archives/faculty/node/107352
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="fine-print">April 27, 2009</span></p>
<p>When a reader searches Richard Wilbur’s name on <em>The New Yorker</em> magazine’s Web site, an incredible 99 results mentioning the prolific poet and member of the college’s Class of 1942 appear. (To put that in context, look up “Robert Frost” and 56 links pop up, while “Emily Dickinson” generates 75.) The pieces themselves are quite impressive, not surprisingly: They include Wilbur’s poems, reviews of his books and translations and other miscellaneous references, such as an intriguing letter by Norman Mailer that cites in passing an invitation Jackie Kennedy made to said Amherst alumnus in the 1960s. <!--break--></p>
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<div><span><img src="/media/view/107354/original/wilbur_sofield.jpg" width="300" height="230" border="0" alt="image"></span></div>
<em>Wilbur and “Writing Poetry I” co-instructor Sofield</em></div>
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</tr></tbody></table><p>Wilbur’s poetry, of course, comprises almost all of the results. The magazine has accepted page after page of his submissions as far back as 45 years ago and as recently as January.</p>
<p>“The present [poetry] editor is Paul Muldoon, and I’m happy to say that he has a soft spot for my poems,” said Wilbur of his long relationship with <em>The New Yorker</em>. And exactly how many of his submissions has the magazine printed? “Quantities.”</p>
<p>Wilbur has been composing poetry since his college days at Amherst and publishing in <em>The New Yorker</em> and other celebrated literary magazines nearly as long. After graduating and serving in the U.S. Army in World War II, he did graduate work at Harvard and embarked on an epic writing jag that has resulted in 10 volumes of poetry and numerous translations of plays and poems in French, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Hungarian and Bulgarian. He taught at a number of institutions as well—Harvard and Wellesley and Wesleyan colleges, to name three—and held the esteemed position of U.S. poet laureate before retiring from the faculty at Smith College in the 1980s. His body of work has earned him two Pulitzer Prizes in poetry, the National Book Award, two Guggenheim fellowships, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and France’s chevalier of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques, among many other honors.</p>
<p>These days, Wilbur is back at his alma mater, co-teaching “Writing Poetry I” with David Sofield, the college’s Samuel Williston Professor of English. Coaxed into returning to campus and serving as a John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer by Sofield and President Anthony W. Marx, he makes the trek from his home in nearby Cummington, Mass., once a week to talk iambic pentameter, onomatopoeia and other poetic devices with a group of 13 students. And while he admitted that coming out of retirement after such a long break was a bit daunting at first, the 88-year-old said the idea of teaching again at Amherst wasn’t too hard a sell in the end. “I’m enjoying it quite a lot,” he said. “In many ways, it feels like the place we in the Class of 1942 knew.”</p>
<p>Wilbur spoke recently with the Office of Public Affairs’ Caroline Hanna about his homecoming, his craft and his own professors at college. To learn more about the first poem he ever published, a conversation he had with legendary <em>New Yorker</em> editor Katharine White (yes, that would be Mrs. E. B. White) and his approach to writing poetry, watch the video interview.</p>
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<h4>Highlights</h4>
<p><em>CH: How was it that you came back to campus?</em><br><br>RW: I don’t know exactly what the machinery of it was. I do know that Tony Marx looks kindly on my poems. I also know that there are quite a few people at Amherst with whom I’ve been friends for a long time who think well of my work—Bill Pritchard, for example, and certainly David Sofield. For a long time, David and I played doubles tennis together. It was always wonderful playing with David; he’s an excellent player, and if I made a mess of things, he could cover the whole court. It’s very pleasant to be working with him. I’m looking forward to next year.<br><em><br>CH: How did you feel when Professor Sofield spoke to you about this?</em><br><br>RW: I had 20 years of retirement after I left Smith College, and naturally, of course, I busily set about forgetting a lot of the scholarship I had known. I set about writing poems and doing some further translations of the great dramatic authors of the French 17th century.... So when I was invited back to Amherst I was of two minds. The idea of coming back was heart-warming, because I’ve always loved the college and the idea of teaching with David sounded splendid to me. At the same time, I felt that I didn’t want to be blocked from the writing that I had been entirely free to do. But I’m happy to say that it’s worked out very well. My poems and translations come along at about the proper rate. I’m still on good terms with the muse. <br><em><br>CH: Did you take poetry classes at Amherst during your own college career?</em><br><br>RW: No. When I was at Amherst as an undergraduate, there was one poet on the faculty—his name was David Morton. I was in a freshman English course of his, which was actually not a very distinguished course. He was a nice man, but he was not a great scholar. When poetry began to excite me at Amherst, it was through teachers like Theodore Baird, [George] Armour Craig, George Roy Elliot and George Whicher, who published the first considerable critique of Emily Dickinson. My teachers—especially in English—were wonderful. Not only were they greatly prepared for our classes and interested in us as students and as persons, they were also very encouraging if you had an inclination to write something. I showed some of my earliest attempts at poetry to the teachers I mentioned. They were very willing to give time and encouragement to young writers quite apart from the courses we were taking. They all, bless them, took me seriously as a writer of poems. They told me what was wrong with what I was doing and how I could make it better, as well as what I ought to read in order to be properly inspired. <br><br><em>CH: What is your approach to teaching?</em></p>
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<div class="mediainline"><span class="inline"><img src="/media/view/107353/original/r_wilbur_seniorpicture.jpg" width="179" height="300" border="0" class="image original" alt="image"></span></div>
<div align="center"><em>Wilbur’s senior photo, 1942</em></div>
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</tr></tbody></table><p>RW: One can’t really teach poetry; one can facilitate it. Actually—I didn’t do this in my poetry course at Amherst because I was taking my lead from David Sofield, who has taught poetry for a number of years here—what I always used to do was give people a stupefying first two hours of instruction in prosody. I found that that really cut down the size of the class. It also gave us a few terms in which to describe each other’s faults…. I do think that there’s a moment in the life of many a student in which he or she feels it might be possible to give a lot of time to writing poetry, that that might be a way of putting one’s world in order for a bit. I think it’s good to encourage that. In every class of poetry writing, I imagine that only two or three out of the fifteen will prove to be publishable poets, but that doesn’t matter. The important thing is to get oneself eloquently off one’s chest. Even if, in taking a course of that kind, one doesn’t write any distinguished poetry, one unquestionably develops a critical gift.<br><br><em>CH: You’ve won many accolades and honors throughout your career, traveled the world, seen and done so many things. Is there something that you want to accomplish that you haven’t been able to do yet?</em><br><br>RW: I guess what I really want to do is finish what may be my last book of poems, and to have it be full of better poems than I’ve ever written. I’m happy to say that I still have my wits about me, and recently I have written two or three poems that do seem to be among my best. But I could very much use a last book or so in which I’ll still be getting better.</p>
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</ul>Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:00:00 +0000channa107352 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/news/archives/faculty/node/107352#commentsRenewing the Vowshttps://www.amherst.edu/amherst-story/magazine/issues/2008_winter/amherstcreates/vows/node/54808
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>By Peter Schmitt ’80. Cincinnati: David Roberts Books, 2007. 69 pages. $17 paperback.</p><p><span class="fine-print">Review by David Sofield<br></span><br><br><span class="drop-cap2"> I</span>n Peter Schmitt’s first book, a poem addressed to a niece notes that “we are always / too close and never / close enough / to our parents.” <em>Renewing the Vows</em>, Schmitt’s third collection, offers half a dozen fully realized examples of how that complicated truth requires a poet who normally writes in the autobiographical first person to contend with <br> adversity.<br><br> The titles are indicative: the poet’s parents depicted “Renewing the Vows” seven months before his father’s death; “Thanksgiving: Visiting My Brother on the Ward” after his brother’s breakdown; writing and many months later slightly revising, when occasion demanded, “My Father’s Obituary.” This last, as it were, answers death and its consequent grief in a muted tour de force of a difficult formal task: very short lines fully rhymed, off-rhymed and para-rhymed in couplets. No one does this better.<br><br> It is syntactical dexterity that structures “Trial,” a single 24-line sentence in unrhymed couplets presenting a succession of MRIs as a “dress rehearsal” for “the crematory’s flames, / busy, thorough, trying to / take their full measure of you.” Not all analogies in the collection are in this key: amusingly, soft contact lenses are “grapeskins of rubbery jelly”; they come with a doctor’s instruction “to blink more, keep the tears / coming. It shouldn’t be hard to comply.” It is as if the deftness of art is one response to the pain that these poems acknowledge again and again. The benefit is ours as well as the poet’s. To read this book is to renew, if not one’s vows, one’s recognition that it is in a poem that a writer’s felt engagement of sorrow can become a reader’s.<br><br> What makes these evocations of personal experience affecting is the presence of many poems that direct attention elsewhere. A poem as light on its feet as is its subject, “Cat in a Hurricane,” ends by addressing “two-year-old Chelsey” in these italicized words: “<em>Oh sweetheart, you’re right: / there’s so much more to be afraid of now.</em>” One of its seven resourceful sonnets, the book’s final poem, “Missionaries in Oman: Collecting Shells,” concludes by playing on the words carved on Emily Dickinson’s gravestone: “And we can call ourselves home, finally.” <br> Renewing the Vows, then, conducts itself in an appealingly unassuming language that owes something to three writers alluded to more than once in Schmitt’s work: Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop and Donald Justice, the poetry director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop when Schmitt was a student there.<br><br> The most attractive poem in a collection that is never less than highly accomplished may be “Field Guide,” in which “we” work through the relevant Peterson volume only to find that once the “positive I.D.” is made and the observers look up from the book, what they—indeed, what we—see is the great creature “beating away / with dinner flapping / in his talons, / leaving us his name/ in a wake of spray—osprey!—/ ‘whose dive,’ / Peterson advises, / ‘is steep, feet-first, / spectacular.’” This typically supple sentence-making, witty to excellent purpose, glances at Bishop’s “The Bight,” then spectacularly recasts the conclusion of Frost’s “The Most of It.” Not buck but bird, momentarily present, yet, the poem admits sanely if ruefully, elusive. A very good book.<br><br><span class="fine-print"> Sofield, the Samuel Williston Professor of English, taught Schmitt at Amherst and is the author, most recently, of <em>Light Disguise</em>, a book of poems. </span></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1765">poetry</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4306">david sofield</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/7031">schmitt</a></div></div></div>Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:59:56 +0000kdduke54808 at https://www.amherst.eduhttps://www.amherst.edu/amherst-story/magazine/issues/2008_winter/amherstcreates/vows/node/54808#commentsEnglish Professor David Sofield To Read from New Book of Poems "Light Disguise" at Amherst College Nov. 17https://www.amherst.edu/news/news_releases/2003/10_2003/node/9316
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="fine-print">October 28, 2003<br>Director of Media Relations<br>413/542-8417</p><p class="text" align="left">AMHERST, Mass.- In his new book, <em>Light Disguise </em>($14, 63 pp., Copper Beech Press, Providence, R.I., 2003), David Sofield, the Samuel Williston Professor of English at Amherst College, offers 30 new poems that "question and re-question their sense of something seen or perhaps of something heard," according to poet Richard Wilbur. Sofield will read from <em>Light Disguise</em> at the Alumni House at Amherst College on Monday, Nov. 17 at 8 p.m., as part of the Creative Writing Center's series of readings.<br><br><em>Light Disguise</em> offers lyrics that explore the dailyness of living, informed by a intelligence that Mary Jo Salter, poet and professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, calls "elegant, erudite, [and] deeply felt." Daniel Hall, poet and writer-in-residence at Amherst says <em>Light Disguise</em> is "as lean and satisfying a book as I've read in years."<br><br>Sofield works comfortably in such traditional forms as the villanelle and sonnet, in couplets and sestets, but also writes long sequences in strict blank verse. As novelist and poet Brad Leithauser, lecturer in humanities at Mount Holyoke College, says, "Unlike so much formal poetry on the scene today, Sofield's work manifests a craftsmanship whose end is not mere deference to tradition or the simple urge to flaunt erudition or expertise; the poems' formal designs are in service to subject matter."<br><br>Sofield's poems have appeared in <em>Poetry</em>, <em>The New Yorker</em>, <em>The Yale Review</em>, <em>The New Criterion</em>, <em>Southwest Review</em> and <em>The New Republic</em>. He co-edited<em> Under Criticism</em> (with Herbert F. Tucker, 1998), a collection of critical essays, to which he contributed "Richard Wilbur's 'Lying'."<br><br>Sofield has taught English and creative writing at Amherst since 1965. He received a B.A. from Princeton University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford.</p><p class="text" align="center">###</p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-1 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/552">news releases</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1609">English</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1765">poetry</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/2474">author</a></div><div class="field-item even"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4305">light disguise</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/taxonomy/term/4306">david sofield</a></div></div></div>Tue, 19 Jun 2007 13:50:03 +0000vrao109316 at https://www.amherst.edu